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Comment by Flott | Hacker News Reader

I can only hope that AV1 is gonna get some traction. It's hard to believe since MPEG-4 and HEVC are already everywhere.

I know that the AOMedia foundation was created in response to MPEG-4 HEVC licensing... Having an alternative might help getting rid of the HEVC!

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> It's hard to believe since MPEG-4 and HEVC are already everywhere.

HEVC is far from being everywhere. Huge services like Youtube, Amazon Video, Netflix and others are going to use AV1, not H.265. H.265 is already dead, it just didn't admit defeat yet.

And Apple joining AV1 group was probably the nail in the coffin.

I don't think HEVC will go away; there's already a lot of fixed-function embedded hardware out there with HEVC decoders that will never get AV1 support. All the streaming players have to support those for the foreseeable future.

Hardware gets obsolete. Fees for HEVC do not, so new hardware won't be using it. For the legacy support, video services will use H.264 like Youtube does now. They just won't offer higher resolution in such cases, which is fine.

There's already tons of devices with H.265 encoders and decoders in hardware. Those aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Plenty of high resolution security cameras use H.265.

> There's already tons of devices with H.265 encoders and decoders in hardware.

Most of such devices also support H.264, which can be used as fallback for those who don't yet support AV1. H.265 isn't needed at all.

There will be some period when H.265 will linger around, but it will eventually die out.

Heh, is not that easy. The reason is simple: high resolution. iirc, for example, Netflix uses h.265 for 2k+ resolutions. They don't even allow 2k+ on hardware that do not have h.265 hardware decoder for that reason.

YouTube 4k also just use VP9 iirc. No H.264.

Not using high resolution for legacy cases, would be an incentive to update devices to those which support AV1. So it only helps this. Youtube does exactly that already.

> They don't even allow 2k+ on hardware that do not have h.265 hardware decoder for that reason.

So Netflix will swap this requirement from H.265 to AV1. Problem solved.

They don't do it for a long time, because that means they will have to KILL support for TVs, Xbox and laptops that already have 4k support. They just use hardware deciding (because of DRM).

Not kill, will just reduce the resolution for them and limit them to H.264 which they support. That would be an incentive to get a device which supports AV1 sooner if someone really needs that high resolution. I'm sure all AV1 backers will do it at some point.

Netflix and I assume Amazon already use H.265, so at best they can use AV1 in addition to H.265 in the future.

They'll simply drop H.265 when they'll deploy AV1. There would be no reason for them to waste all that money.

Netflix can't just drop support for my TV.

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